Building a Business on the Cheap

This talk will discuss lessons learned creating GitHub. We used open source software, open sourced many parts of the site, took no outside investment, and spent our weekends building the site until it was at the point where it could sustain itself.

Specifically, the talk will focus on open sourcing as much of your infrastructure as possible (especially non-conventional pieces), using as much open source as possible, contributing back to projects you use, building good will in the open source community, being smart about your budget, and some different approaches to finding the money required to bring an idea to life.

While this won’t be a GitHub advertisement, it will hopefully be an advertisement for bootstrapped companies. The goal is to share lessons learned (the hard way), answer questions, and hopefully inspire others to strike out on their own.